Saturday - May 25, 2013

Media Bias And Commies And Coverups

An excellent essay by Ron Unz at The American Conservative. Well worth the 20 minutes spent reading it.

Our American Pravda

Peiper, this bit about White adds a new twist to those financial history books you’ve sent me in the past ... though it is a minor point in this essay.

The realization that the world is often quite different from what is presented in our leading newspapers and magazines is not an easy conclusion for most educated Americans to accept, or at least that was true in my own case. For decades, I have closely read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and one or two other major newspapers every morning, supplemented by a wide variety of weekly or monthly opinion magazines. Their biases in certain areas had always been apparent to me. But I felt confident that by comparing and contrasting the claims of these different publications and applying some common sense, I could obtain a reasonably accurate version of reality. I was mistaken.

In mid-March, the Wall Street Journal carried a long discussion of the origins of the Bretton Woods system, the international financial framework that governed the Western world for decades after World War II. A photo showed the two individuals who negotiated that agreement. Britain was represented by John Maynard Keynes, a towering economic figure of that era. America’s representative was Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury and long a central architect of American economic policy, given that his nominal superior, Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., was a gentleman farmer with no background in finance. White was also a Communist agent.

Author James Bovard has described our society as an “attention deficit democracy,” and the speed with which important events are forgotten once the media loses interest might surprise George Orwell.

Even after all these years, I don’t agree with this guy’s take on the Iraq war. I don’t think the MSM was supporting it one iota once the conflict had lasted more than a month and a half. And I still don’t swallow the “Bush lied” line. But that may be a minor quibble compared to the rest of the essay.

A democracy may provide voters with a choice, but that choice is largely determined by the information citizens receive from their media.

Most of the Americans who elected Barack Obama in 2008 intended their vote as a total repudiation of the policies and personnel of the preceding George W. Bush administration. Yet once in office, Obama’s crucial selections—Robert Gates at Defense, Timothy Geither at Treasury, and Ben Bernake at the Federal Reserve—were all top Bush officials, and they seamlessly continued the unpopular financial bailouts and foreign wars begun by his predecessor, producing what amounted to a third Bush term.

The half dozen links to follow-on articles will take you about an hour to churn through. In the end, whether you accept all, part, or none or it, your perceptions will probably be forever altered.

Deep stuff. And a great key to open the doorway to a weekend open thread discussion.

Posted by Drew458     on 05/25/2013 at 09:46 AM   
Filed Under: • Government • Media-Bias •  
• Comments (2) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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